


Going My Way

by Schwoozie



Category: The Walking Dead (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - No Zombies, F/M, Leap Year, One Shot, Road Trips
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-26
Updated: 2015-08-26
Packaged: 2018-04-17 07:42:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,587
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4658271
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Schwoozie/pseuds/Schwoozie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Beth and Jimmy have been practically engaged since birth; all it will take is a five hour drive from Senoia to Charleston to make it official. </p><p>Beth doesn't expect to get stranded several miles down the road. She definitely doesn't expect a rough and rowdy motorcyclist to pick her up. But it's alright; it's been a long time since she's done something other than what was expected.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Going My Way

**Author's Note:**

> Un-beta'd.
> 
> Based on the film "Leap Year." Watch it and cry at all the delicious tropes.

The verandah is like the one at home, but only just. This one is brown, where home is white; falls more naturally into rusticity, rather than aspiring to the glamor of it. It is smaller, with steeper steps and wind chimes that sway in the breeze. It is like home, but it is not home; and Beth doesn't know if that place will be fully home for her ever again. Not after this weekend. Not after this.

She holds the glass of sweet tea to her chest, enjoying the feeling of the condensation against her breastbone. Upon hearing Beth say in passing how much she enjoys a glass in the morning, Mrs. Horvath had been kind enough to make it before she went to bed. It was easy, she said; easy as boiling water.

Beth's own blood boils in the morning heat. Barely sunrise, and she feels sweat beading her hairline, trickling down her temples. She had been too self-conscious to shower last night, too nervous with the knowledge of him just beyond the door. When he comes out for breakfast, maybe she will slip back in, wash herself. Let the cool water run over her shoulders and her breasts and between her legs and bring to life a new woman.

She wonders how many times one can be born anew, in a single weekend.

She wonders how many more lives she has left to go.

* * *

On a fair-weather day with clear roads and a friendly breeze, the journey from Senoia to Charleston should take roundabout five hours and a half.

That's what Beth's phone told her two days ago, when she set out from her farm in the wee hours of the morning, nothing but Shawn's truck and a GPS to lead her to her future.

The truck broke down halfway to Macon. Her phone lost battery before she even hit Forsyth.

She found herself in the middle of nowhere with a ring in her pocket and all her dreams—of finding Jimmy at his grandma's house in Charleston, of bringing him down to the water where her own Daddy had proposed to her mama those years before, of asking him to marry her—vanishing into the rear view mirror.

And then a man on a motorcycle found her crying on the side of the road.

She saw him coming a long way off, and expected him to pass, just as the dozen or so motorists had before him—but he slowed down. Came to a stop. Squinted at her through dime-store sunglasses and asked what in the hell was the matter with her.

He used a few more expletives than that. But the good thing was Beth was too distraught to heed Maggie's voice in her head, telling her to brush this stranger off and send him on his way. He looked like exactly the kind of man you _wouldn't_ want to meet on a deserted highway, with sunset not far off; dust-stained from the road, rippling in denim and leather and cigarette ash. But she was distraught. She was desperate. She had two days until the anniversary of her parents' engagement to get to Charleston and make herself the most marriageable girl there was ever to be.

She asked if he was going her way and he said yes. And off they went.

* * *

The bike was stolen at the first pit stop they hit, when she got locked in the bathroom and needed his help getting out. There were tornado warnings the day after, keeping them locked in their Motel 6 with questionable characters until the sirens stopped blaring.

And now she is at a bed and breakfast on the side of the road, on a verandah much like the one at home, less than 24 hours until the anniversary will have passed her by—and she couldn't care less. She couldn't care less. She is alone with a stranger who she's seen beat two men to a pulp with his bare hands, and she couldn't care a cat's whisker less.

She should be thinking about Jimmy. She knows she should be thinking about Jimmy—her boyfriend since the last year of middle school, her friend since forever, practically her betrothed since birth—but were an artist to wander by and ask her to describe the image of her love, she could not give them an answer. Not a true one.

She has another man's face in her mind's eye. She couldn't bring Jimmy's to the fore for the world.

* * *

His name is Daryl Dixon, he has nowhere in particular to be, and as long as her money is good he'll take her anywhere she fucking wants to go.

She wonders if that still applies after last night.

* * *

After two minutes in their front room, Beth could tell the owners of the inn were devoutly religious; and there's no way in hell they'd let out their last room to a couple who wasn't married.

So Beth made her proposal. A day early, and without a ring, and to the wrong man, but she made it.

At the time, she attributed the butterflies in her stomach to guilt at betraying Jimmy like this, fear of Daryl's reaction. But really, she wasn't thinking of Jimmy; and she had long ago realized that she could take anything Daryl Dixon could dish out.

So she said they were newlyweds waiting on their rings. She described a ceremony where they stood before God and everyone and proclaimed their love for one another. She held Daryl's hand and when the Horvaths prompted her she kissed him.

And kissed him. And kissed him.

And just as she began to pull back, she felt him kissing her too.

* * *

She can tell it's him by how silently the door opens; she only knows there's someone there at all by the light the lamps inside throw across her lap.

There are several moments when he doesn't move, and she feels a stab of worry that he won't come outside after all—but then the door closes, and he is still on her side of it. And she doesn't try to temper her smile when he settles on the bench beside her.

“Mornin',” he says.

She doesn't look at him head on—feels like it would be tempting fate to do so—but she does allow her smile to widen, so he can see it.

“Morning.”

And that's all for a while. They sit together and watch the shadows made by the long grass pivot and shorten; they feel the heat of the day rise even further. Daryl didn't take a shower last night either, and they are close enough that Beth knows he smells much like he did when she had her cheek pressed against his back on the motorcycle—male sweat and engine grease and the leather of his vest. She wonders if such a scent would even come off in the wash—wonders if it is not simply part of who he is.

She wonders what he would smell like with all of it stripped away. She wonders if she'll get the chance to find out.

“I'm sorry,” he says.

Now that's something she never expected to hear.

“What for?” she asks. There's plenty he could be referring to. For cursing her out after the bike was stolen. Giving her the silent treatment for hours afterwards. Mocking her family, her life, her long blonde hair; even once, by accident, the scar on her wrist.

“Last night. How I slept.” Beth looks at him and she's never seen him so beet red. “I didn't mean to touch you or nothin', or take advantage–“

“I didn't think you were taking advantage.”

Daryl pauses, looking at her through his bangs. His eyes are like shards of blue ice in the desert.

“Well, I just... I didn't mean to. That's all.”

And Beth feels a moment of intense self-hatred, because she's disappointed. She's disappointed it was the coincidence of sleep and not conscious choice that led to them all wrapped up in each other. She's disappointed he regrets it. She's disappointed he doesn't know—and how would he know?—how she's never slept better; how waking in his arms was one of the most beautiful moments of Beth's young life.

But he doesn't think so. And that's ok. Because Beth is traveling to Charleston to get engaged and the intended groom is not the man beside her. That man knows she's on her way, if not for what purpose; there's no way she could do what she wants, which is pool her savings with Daryl to buy him a new motorcycle; ride it up north, maybe, or back west, towards home; show up on her front door with this man scraggly and rough and show her daddy the rings on their fingers.

She doesn't know when she started wanting that, but she does. God she does.

Ever since she was a little girl, she's wanted things she can't have.

He looks so lovely, though, sitting beside her in the morning sun. Dirty and embarrassed and lovely.

She doesn't think about it before she reaches into his lap to take hold of one of his fidgeting hands, feels it freeze as she draws it to the bench between them.

She doesn't think what Jimmy would say. She doesn't think what Maggie would do, if she saw Beth holding hands with a man like this. She doesn't even think about Daryl's reaction, although that is instantaneous: a tightening of his grip as she twines her fingers with his, holding her like she's a lifeline pulling him to shore. That could mean something. It could.

But now is not the time to think of others.

This is a moment she'll give herself.

* * *

“I've never been outta Georgia before.”

That's the last thing Daryl Dixon says to her, before he leaves her on the pier, Jimmy smiling blandly at her side, his own ring concealed in his pocket.

She cries when Jimmy goes onto one knee; cries through her yes, cries through his embrace, cries all the way back to his dying grandma's house.

Beth doesn't know what her last words to Daryl were.

But she knows who her tears belong to.

* * *

She leaves Jimmy exactly a month after they get engaged—goes to his house and returns the ring and drives away without an ounce of remorse or regret.

Then she starts looking.

She goes to every bar in town searching for Daryl Dixon. Maggie, who she enlists to drive her, thinks she's mad; doesn't understand how someone could get a grip on her sister's heart so fast, and with such ferocity. But she helps. She scours phone books and goes to City Hall for birth certificates and even charms the man at the Harley dealership into showing her his receipts. She does her sisterly duty, and Beth could honestly ask for nothing more.

They look hard. Beth thinks she finds something when the Latino barkeep she's speaking with gives a start when he hears Daryl's name; but in the end, it's all for naught.

Daryl Dixon came into her life with a roar; it's fitting, perhaps, for him to leave it with a whisper.

She's just about given up hope when Maggie nearly shakes her sleepy head into her cereal, bringing her attention to the sound of a motor rising outside.

Beth bursts through the door moments later, skidding to a stop at the edge of the porch and he's there, he's there, just like she's imagined—dirty and windswept and breathtaking on the back of a beat-up motorcycle.

“Hey,” he says.

“Hey,” she says.

She curls her toes and realizes she's run out here barefoot in sleep shorts and a tank top without a built-in bra.

And he's looking at her. His eyes are sweeping her body as she stands on the porch in the light of the rising sun and she is certain her head is about to snap away and drift into the clouds.

“What are you doing here?” she blurts out.

He doesn't look as nervous as he should, she thinks; he always seemed so nervous around her, nervous until he wasn't, and he's looking at her with a self-assuredness she never imagined she'd see on his face.

He looks good like that.

He looks _sexy_.

Not that he doesn't look that way every day of the week.

“Heard some blonde chick was looking for me,” he says. A smirk touches his lips. “Martinez said she seemed sober, so that narrowed the list a bit.”

“Yeah. I was looking for you. I _am_.”

“Well. I'm here.”

Beth is silent for a long time, thoughts whirling in her head. How handsome he looks, in the post-dawn sun. How the light reflects off the oil in his hair, the chrome on his bike, the buckle of his belt; how his lips look under his tongue, wetting them to speak something she might not be ready for.

“I left Jimmy,” she blurts out. His mouth closes. “It–, turns out he was just proposing to make his grandma happy. Said she'd leave a bigger inheritance if he was married and...” Beth bites her lip. “You don't care, I guess.”

“I do,” he says. His voice sounds rougher than normal, and he clears his throat. He looks uncomfortable again, but only just. “I care, Beth.”

“Oh,” she says.

“Yeah.” Daryl looks down, rubs his hands up and down his thighs. The motion distracts Beth enough that it takes her a few moments to realize he's looking at her again.

Her breath catches at that look. It looks like wistfulness. It looks like hope.

“I'm headed on the road for a while. Got off from work. Thought I'd really get outta Georgia this time. See something worth seeing.” He swallows; looks at her through his bangs, like he always does when he needs her to listen. “Just wondering, is all.”

“Wondering what?” she breathes.

“If you're goin' my way," he says. "Thought you'd maybe come along.”

* * *

She doesn't turn to where her daddy and Maggie are pressing themselves against the front window. She doesn't go into the house for clothes, or shoes.

She runs. She runs to him.

The bike nearly topples over when she slams into his chest, but he doesn't let her go to save it; just clenches his thighs and stands his ground and crushes her to his chest like he hasn't seen her in years.

“I wasn't going that way,” Beth whispers against his cheek. “But I want to. If you are, I want to.”

“Me too,” he says.

She pulls back and with the way he looks at her mouth, she knows he wants to kiss her. But she doesn't let him yet. She does what she wanted to do at dawn almost two months before; she grips his shoulder and swings her leg over the bike. Squeaks a little as the sun-heated leather blasts through her thin cotton shorts. Squeaks again when he grabs her arms and drags them around him to clasp over his stomach, tight as a vice, tight as a dream.

She clings to him as the engine roars to life, takes them away.

The sun crests the trees just as they reach the top of the hill. When Beth points, Daryl looks, and with wind in their hair they watch the day begin.

For now and forever, she's convinced; she's never seen anything more lovely than a bright Georgia morning.

 


End file.
